Exterior Design

Except for the labels, the Corsair PSUs look almost exactly like their Seasonic counterparts.

The characteristic panel with modular connectors betrays their kinship with Seasonic. Next to it, there are five vent slits, four on one side of the connectors and one on the other side. The sophisticated case design is also reminiscent of Seasonic.

The main external difference is about the cooling fan. The familiar Sanyo Denki is covered by a conventional wire grid rather than by Seasonic’s punched-out honeycomb mesh. We don’t mind this simplification because the wire grid causes less resistance to the air flow, even though doesn’t look very attractive.

There’s another simplification on the back panel. We see an ordinary sticker instead of a badge with metallized logo there.

We find no other differences from Seasonic's original products.

Circuit Design

The interior design copies Seasonic's Gold-certified series in every detail. We can see DC-DC converters on the modular connector card, modest-sized heatsinks, a lot of solid-state capacitors in the output circuitry, and a number of other familiar features like the synchronous rectifier based on field-effect transistors instead of diodes.

The only difference is merely visual: the PCBs and heatsinks of the Corsair-branded PSUs are all consistently black whereas the original Seasonics sported a number of colors.

If we take a closer look, we can see stickers with Corsair’s AX marking on a couple of daughter cards. These cards had stickers with Seasonic’s KM marking in the original PSUs, so we can expect some differences between these components. We can't be sure because we don't have the Seasonic PSUs or their photos at hand. Anyway, we'll see during our tests if there are indeed any differences showing up in practice.

Each of the three Corsair PSUs has the same interior design. They only differ in the ratings of certain components and the number of solid-state capacitors installed in the output circuit (the 650W model has four empty places for such capacitors; the 750W model has two empty places; and the highest-wattage model comes with all the capacitors installed).

Like their Seasonic counterparts, the Corsair PSUs have electrolytic capacitors from United Chemi-Con which enjoy an excellent reputation.